Reviews of Books

"Why Did the Anasazi All Live in National Parks?": Indian Histories, Hemispheric Contexts, and "America's Beginnings"¹

Colin G. Calloway

In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reports filtered back to Europe about America and the peoples who lived there. The reports were always incomplete, often inaccurate, and sometimes contained more imagination than information. But they forced Europeans to confront the question of America and in doing so to think again about their own history and place in the world. In the late twentieth century, scholarship on the native peoples of the Americas finally began to make an impact on mainstream history. The new scholarship by archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists was incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and occasionally owed more to fertile imagination than to hard evidence uncovered from the ground, culled from the archives, or gathered in native communities. But it forced historians to confront the question of native peoples and to think again about the way history had been written and taught. For fifteenth-century European travelers and for twentieth-century American historians, discovering Indians proved to be a momentous event.	1
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas is an impressive and formidable collection of three two-volume boxed sets that summarizes scholarship on Indian peoples as it existed by the end of the twentieth century. Some sixty-five contributors, all of whom have made their own mark on their respective fields, wrestle with the challenge of providing comprehensive thematic, regional, and chronological coverage in chapters that are also designed to be "idea oriented" (South America, 1:1–2). They strive "to synthesize existing knowledge rather than to present the results of original research or to pioneer innovative approaches" (North America, 1:xiii), and each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographic essay. Many authors are interdisciplinary in their work, drawing on archaeological, ethnographic, and documentary sources as well as on historical linguistics, demography, epidemiology, and other relevant fields. Each of the three sets focuses primarily on pre-contact societies and post-contact experiences; twentieth-century developments are covered rather summarily.	2
The North American volume includes chapters on early hunter-gatherers and farmers and on the rise of chiefdoms in the Eastern Woodlands prior to European contact; it surveys native interactions with Europeans and Euro-Americans by region and by period, carrying the story up to 1995. Co-edited by prominent Canadian anthropologist Bruce G. Trigger and the late Wilcomb E. Washburn, it addresses developments in Canada as well as in the United States, although in comparison to the massive coverage accorded South America the space devoted to Canada seems rather slight. The first Mesoamerican volume provides a regional survey of native cultures before the Spanish conquests; the second volume a regional overview of Mesoamerica since the Spanish invasion. The South American volume is the first publication of such chronological, geographic, and ethnographic scope since Julian Steward's Handbook of South American Indians (1946), which it revises and updates to provide a historical rather than evolutionist approach. In twenty-six chapters and two thousand pages it surveys native and European approaches to history, the earliest South American lifeways in different regions, crises and transformations in invaded societies, colonial conditions, the creation of new ethnicities, recurrent rebellions, wars of independence and nation-making in the nineteenth century, and the emergence of indigenous movements among both Andean and lowland peoples in the twentieth century.	. . .